Cheating requires myths to keep it going. It takes lies to keep a lying lifestyle going. The cheater may use these lies against you, whether to justify their behavior or to pressure you into their world/worldview.
Much like vaccines are a method used in protecting you against diseases, you need a way of vaccinating yourself against the cheater myths.
Dealing with Cheater Myths <<– listen to the audio here
Hi there, this is Jeff Murrah and I want to welcome you to another show of Affair Recovery Radio. I’m glad that you’re here today.
In today’s show, we’re going to be dealing with cheater myths. When you live with a cheater, handling the myths is one of the challenges that you’re going to find yourself dealing with. Because cheating often requires myths to keep it going, and to keep the whole lifestyle lying going.
I use the term myth because we’re dealing with a whole network of lies here. We’re dealing with a mindset of lies. I’m looking at myths as being lies on a much larger scale. When you’re dealing with a cheater, you’re not dealing with just some occasional white lies. You’re dealing with something much bigger.
When the cheater is caught up in these cheater myths, they may use the lies against you. Whether it’s to justify their behavior or try to pressure you into their world, or even their worldview. Because sometimes they will try to get you into what they’re doing, and if you refuse to go into it they at least want you to look at the situation and the affair and stuff the way that they do.
Much like vaccines are used to protect you against many disease, you need a way to vaccinate yourself against the cheater myths. And there’s many myths, and new ones are continually being propagated all the time.
For some of them: “Monogamy is only a social contract” and “Humans are not, by nature, monogamous”, and “I was born this way”, “Variety is the spice of life”. And there’s many more beyond that. It’s just the ones about monogamy and being monogamous, those are just some of the latest that are out there.
What happens with these myths, they’re often half-truths purposely designed to deceive and confuse. They’ll take one or two observations and build a whole way of looking at things that is designed to distract. They usually don’t take it very kindly when you go against it.
The question comes up, how can you deal with these cheater myths. My answer that I’m going to give you, I call it the naa-naa-naa answer, because it’s Neutralize, Activate, and Avoid.
I know many times, as a child, a lot of times when you were faced with a situation where you didn’t want to hear what was going on, you would put your fingers in your ears and go “naa-naa-naa.”
This is not a variation of that, but that’s a word picture to help you in terms of dealing with these cheater myths and remembering that the naa-naa-naa stands for neutralize, activate, and avoid.
- First you have to neutralize them. This means that you need to cancel the myth out in your mind. This can be done by telling yourself I reject the myth, of course you fill in the blank, even if it’s just in your head. This is essential in maintaining a clear head.
Because what happens when they start spewing out all these myths, if your mind does not neutralize it, it goes into your head, takes up space, rattles around, and does damage.
You don’t need that. When you don’t neutralize it, these ideas continue to live in your head. At this point, you don’t want to give them room to live in your head. And the best way is to just consciously say I reject the myth.
It’s going to be important to specifically ‘name’ the myth and to say “I reject ________ “, so that your mind literally puts up this iron wall keeping it from going in.
2. Recognize that seduction starts in the head. Cheaters know this. It happened to them, and it can happen to you. Once you’ve been mentally seduced, the foreplay is merely mopping up.
This is why you want to neutralize the myth and protect your mind. Because an awake, alert, and active mind is much harder to seduce. I know it sounds strange, talking about a cheater seducing their spouse.
The cheater’s getting to this way of living where they seduce a lot of things around them, and they may try to seduce you into a way of life that you really are not wanting.
When you recognize, and this is the part that I refer to as activate, because you’re activating your conscious mind in doing so.
3. Avoid changing the cheater. This one may sound a little strange, but let me go ahead and clarify it. It’s going to be important to not make it your mission to change the cheater at this point. Trying to win over the cheater at this point is dangerous. It’s more important to neutralize the message at this point.
Because you’re going to have to take all the poison out of the myth before you start trying to change their mind. If you’re going around trying to change their mind, it sets you up for problems.
When the myth is neutralized, and it has no more power, then the cheater starts to feel more frustrated. Like hey, maybe my idea is not the truth, maybe I’ve been believing a lie. And they start the process of rejecting it themselves. Ideally, that’s what you want.
In some cases you may have to intervene more directly. But for most of you when you’re dealing with the phase of the affair and affair recovery where cheater myths come into play, you want to neutralize the myths first before you start doing interventions.
These are things that you can start doing right now. Because here at Affair Recovery Radio, we believe an affair does not have to mean the end of your marriage, and that you can survive the affair. We want to give you those tools to enable you to do so. That’s part of why we’re here.
I hope you enjoyed today’s show.
Because society as a whole benefits from stronger families and stronger marriages.
Best Regards,
Jeff
